


The Etymology of a World

by orbythesea



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-11
Updated: 2007-12-11
Packaged: 2017-10-18 21:56:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/193721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orbythesea/pseuds/orbythesea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"His tongue forms words that others can understand and embrace, his own language alien and lost in the translation."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Etymology of a World

He was never meant to survive the war. It was a simple calculation and an easy one. End it all, end with it. Few things happen the way they're meant to, and across the galaxies, two planets burned. He watched, cold, detached, waiting for the end. He miscalculated. Galifrey exploded, tearing the fabric of space and time as it was swallowed, sucked into the void, erased. Yet he survived.

Time is a remarkable healer, and it begins to mend its own wounds. Fragments are stitched back together, like a darned sock: whole and complete, yet altered and weakened. Still, he is a Time Lord, and he can see it all. He can _feel_ it all. It's an ironic twist of time, and the burden of it nearly breaks him.

He knows the consequences, he knows the risk of irreparably changing constants. Yet time is already altered, and he is arrogant enough to think he can set right anything he might tear asunder. Unthinking, he whispers stories across the galaxies, recreates Gallifrey not as was but as he wishes to remember it: a beautiful, tranquil, perfect world lost out there amongst the heavens.

His tongue forms words that others can understand and embrace, his own language alien and lost in the translation. His stories merge with the native cultures and this new story becomes a legend, changing and evolving. Gallifrey is lost as his own truths and fictions merge into legend but he is never there to hear them. He moves forwards, backwards, over and over telling a new variant on the same story.

Plato calls it Atlantis, buried deep between the black shifting waters of space and time, and then, later, simply water. The Celts call it Avalon, the land shrouded in mists before it is forever swallowed, lost.

Years go by, and he allows himself to speak with a bit more clarity, a bit more realism. Gallifrey and Skaro, burning through the endless night while their Lord and executioner watches. Gallifrey and Skaro, Sodom and Gomorra.

Years later the legends combine again, story and scholarship merging and he isn't even there when More gives it yet another name. He creates a perfect Platonic fantasy and seals it with a name borrowed from the Greeks. No place, he calls it. The place that doesn't exist. Even that meaning will be lost, but the name will remain. It will be passed down through the eons until it echoes at the edges of time, whispered: Utopia.


End file.
